Caroline Myss: The Shadow Course, Part 2

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You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Caroline Myss. Caroline Myss is the author of four New York Times bestsellers, Anatomy of the Spirit, Sacred Contracts, Invisible Acts of Power, and Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can. A leading voice in the field of energy medicine and human consciousness, she holds degrees in journalism, theology, intuition and energy medicine. With Sounds True, Caroline Myss, along with Andrew Harvey, has created a new eight-week transformational online learning course called [The Shadow Course]: An Eight-Week Journey to Know Yourself and Bring Light to the World, beginning on September 1st. In this in-depth journey with Caroline and Andrew, you’re guided to uncovering what you don’t know about yourself so you can come into alignment with your true power and purpose.

In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Caroline and I spoke about how you know the shadow is at work whenever you engage in blame or thinking that you deserve something. We also talked about why people are more comfortable with their shadow than with their light, and how shadow issues like greed and over-responsibility can show up as health challenges. We also talked about how Caroline would work as a spiritual director with someone who presented envy as a shadow issue in their life. Finally, Caroline spoke about how bringing awareness to our personal shadow is indeed the engine for social change in the world. Here’s my conversation on [The Shadow Course] with Caroline Myss.

Caroline, you and Andrew Harvey will be teaching a new eight-week online course with Sounds True, that begins on September 1, called [The Shadow Course]. To begin with, I would love it if you would define for our listeners how you think of Shadow work.

Caroline Myss:Well, I don’t think of it, first of all, as something negative. I think that that’s the first thing that has to be established. The Shadow is that part of us that we don’t know very well. That sounds like a small sentence, but actually it’s great big huge, because people think that we’re… We think we’re born knowing ourselves, and it’s really an astounding thought to people when they realize that we’re born strangers to ourselves, and that part of the experience of life is getting to know who we are day by day, relationship through relationship, experience through experience.

For example, you don’t know that you have a language facility until you go to school and you study languages. You don’t know that you’re good at music until you’re introduced to music. You don’t know anything about yourself. You have to figure out who you are, what you like, what you don’t like, and in part of that, you have to discover what about you is also triggered in darkness, what about you you’re afraid of and why you’re afraid of it, and what that—the kind of power that fear has. Or why, for example, you’re afraid to pursue a challenge you have, why you’re afraid to move on with your independence, why you need the acknowledgment of other people before you’re able to do anything.

Without that, you don’t move forward and then you build up resentment and hostility when people don’t acknowledge you. This is called your shadow. This is the part of you that you’re uncomfortable with, that operates in the hidden caverns in yourself, and oftentimes, people will get into a relationship with the unconscious agenda of having that person find out more about them than they know themselves. You’ll see how many times people will say to someone, “You don’t really know me.” What they’re really saying is, “I don’t really know me and I was hoping you’d do a better job at it.”

TS: OK, so if the Shadow is the part of ourselves that we don’t know, and there’s lots of parts of ourselves that we don’t know, what is the most effective way, in your view, to start to learn about these parts of ourselves that are currently in hiding?

CM: Well, any time you answer a question, “I don’t know,” you finish it with, “but I’m going to find out,” “but I need to find out, because I’m too old not to know myself.” And that’s not allowed. You change the rule. You never let yourself off the hook by saying, “I don’t know.” Secondly, you never again blame another person for your own actions for choices that you make.

TS: OK, that’s pretty big. Most people spend a lot of time, at least internally, blaming someone for something.

CM: Yes. So that’s not allowed anymore. You never, ever, ever again use another person’s name in the explanation of why you do what you do, of why you said what you said, of why you are the person you are. You… when the action you’ve taken is negative. You can credit, for example, I frequently credit a wonderful mentor I had in college for inspiring me in terms of how to teach and how to love and respect knowledge, and the calling it is to pass on knowledge, but to take somebody and to blame another human being for a negative attitude I have or why I would hang up the phone on you and then turn around and say, “Well, you know I had a bad childhood and my mother”—that’s not allowed because the only person residing in my body is me.

I’m too old to blame anybody for my actions anymore. That’s what ceases. As tempting as that is, and we’re all tempted to do that, to say, “You made me angry,” the rules change when you realize, “I had options. I didn’t have to get angry.” Anger is the fastest, quickest response. That’s the one that seems to let the other person know, and is the response that seems to effect and get me the most powerful consequence that I’m looking for, but I also have the option of saying to this other person, “Wait a minute. This is getting out of hand.” I could also do that. I could also back off and say, “I don’t think I’m really understanding what you’re trying to say to me, and so I’m getting angry. I don’t want to get angry.” So I have other options.

TS: Now, Caroline, I just want to make sure I understand something. When we find ourselves blaming someone … I notice this. I blame people that I work with for a project not working, etc., etc., etc. How is that my shadow showing itself for my recognition and awareness?

CM: OK, let’s follow this through because we’ve both been bosses and we’ve both had employees.

TS: There’s lots of people to blame.

CM: Right, and so we’ve both had the experience of hiring people who don’t do their job well. We both had to say to somebody, “You’re not adequate. You can’t do this.” We both have had the experience of trusting someone to do something, and they didn’t come through. It is OK to recognize this person, can’t call it, it just didn’t work. It just didn’t work. But when we take it a step further, I’d have to ask myself deep in my gut in this age of intuition, in this age of gut resource, and your gut is a resource, in this age of gut resource, I have to ask myself, “Why did I hire them? Why did I ask that person to do this in the first place? Was there anywhere along the line that I actually questioned working with this person?”

You know, nine out of ten times the answer is yes. Maybe at that time I didn’t recognize the signal quickly enough to stop myself and say, “This is a signal telling me to not give this responsibility to this person.” Blaming somebody and saying, “You’re the reason this didn’t work,” is—I guess my feeling is that it’s the lowest way to handle something and nobody learns. You, most of all, won’t learn from it, but I will always tell someone, “First find the intuitive thread. First find it,” because you will. You’ll find that you had some kind of sense somewhere about that situation.

I’ll tell you that the other person did as well. Maybe somewhere along the line, that person thought, “I shouldn’t do this job. It’s out of my league,” or somewhere along the line, the person thought, “I’m consciously not doing a good job but I don’t care,” whatever it is. It’s OK to hold another person accountable, but accountability is not blame. There’s a difference. Accountability is not blame. To me, when you—holding someone accountable is saying, “I gave you this to do, and it is my assessment that you did not do it, so that’s the end of this. You’re going to go your way and I’m going to stay here.” Accountability is what we have to do, but then turning around and blaming someone for abilities they do not have, not being able to assess them fully, that’s where I draw the line and say, “Now, what did I miss? What didn’t I see clearly?”

That’s where I would say to someone as a spiritual director, “Instead of going into blame, let’s go into analysis here. Let’s go into interpretation. What didn’t you see clearly and why not? Because you could have. You have the gut tools to have seen something else, to have felt something else. If not, you’re going to develop them so that this doesn’t happen again.”

TS: In [The Shadow Course], there’s this sentence that I pulled out. You stated, “You know the shadow is at work in your life whenever you engage in blame or thinking you deserve something.”

CM: Yes, blame and deserve. Those are the two words I tell everybody to drop immediately.

TS: Talk some about this sense of deserving because I think a lot of people think they deserve a lot of things.

CM: Let me finish something else here, and that’s that another question I would always ask somebody is, “Did you operate in naivety?” which is a question that needs to be asked every day of somebody. If I was your spiritual director, I would say, “Did you operate in blind trust?” That is a foolish way to operate. “Did you operate in naivety? Did you drop the ball in managing, in overseeing?” Because what you always have to assume is what you just said, that the Shadow is operating. What does it mean to be unconscious? If I was your spiritual director or your abbess in a monastery, what is my role? My role is to help you become aware of your shadow, and my role in doing that is to be aware of the shadow you’re not yet aware of, to know that in this situation it is very likely that you’re going to be tempted to drop the ball.

I need to be there before you drop the ball because I know it is likely you’re going to do that. It is my job as an abbess, as a spiritual director, to be the [inaudible 00:15:11], to assume you’re going to drop that ball, because you’re not perfect. I would never leave someone to their own devices unless I’d worked with them and I knew them, like my business partner and I’ve known him for 18 years. I know every inch of how he thinks and works, and he knows every inch of how I think and work, even down to knowing each other’s shadows. How often he’d say to me, “I can’t book you like that because I know exactly what you’re going to do if you’re overtired. You’ll bite someone’s head off and I’m not doing that.” He knows my shadow. He knows exactly how I will behave if I’m overtired. It’s not personal.

He knows exactly how snappy I get, so he manages even my shadow. It’s not personal. He knows. “It’ll come out. I’ve seen it. I know it. It will. Forget it. I’m sending you home right after this.”

TS: OK, Caroline, so I think this issue of blame and how the Shadow is at work when we blame, I think that’s pretty clear, but let’s talk about this “deserving” notion. As I said, I think a lot of people think, “I deserve to not have my band account effected when there’s an economic downturn. I deserve someone who loves me.”

CM: “I deserve a happy marriage,” or “I deserve a relationship that doesn’t fall apart.”

TS: How is that the shadow? How is that the shadow at work?

CM: Well, because first of all, “deserve” assumes that you’re the center of the universe and that justice revolves around you. Number two, it assumes the position that your wounds should be rewarded. It assumes an attitude that simply has no merit—and that’s that suffering should be rewarded, especially yours. Because that attitude is so fundamentally foul, it collides with any reason to heal. Why would you give up your wounds if your wounds are rewarded and you could pull them out at any convenient time? “I deserve. I’ve had a bad day. I am unhappy. I deserve to spend this kind of money. That doesn’t matter. I’m not happy. I’m not happy. I deserve opiates. I don’t know how else to be happy and to stop thinking about my misery.”

That’s why it’s such an egregious way of thinking. It’s self-destructive and at its heart, it’s self-pity. It allows somebody to be lazy, to go into their weakest spot and indulge it, and never get out because it’s really a shadow comfort zone. You get to have whatever you want, do whatever you want, and have no—and here’s the operative word—conscience about it. Not consciousness, but conscience. You have done nothing bad. Whether you’ve overspent, overate, overslept, overlied, didn’t tell the truth, it doesn’t matter because you were just not happy. So you can get away with anything because you deserved it because you were so unhappy or you were just so sad, or something woke up your bad memory. That is a whole template, a whole way of being that has been nurtured, nurtured, encouraged, encouraged in our society.

TS: OK, so let’s say someone’s listening and they’re like, “You know, there are moments when I think, ‘God, I’ve worked really hard today. I deserve to just sit here and watch television and eat potato salad,'” or whatever it might be, or “I deserve a happy marriage. I’m a loving person,” so the people that identify at this moment where they’re saying, “I deserve” to themselves, what would you suggest as part of this Shadow work?

CM: I would say, “Oh, that’s absolutely ridiculous. You deserve absolutely nothing, nothing. You never have and you never will.” However, if you want to watch TV, just say so, just say so. Just say, “I want to watch TV.” It’s not a matter of deserving. It’s what I want to do. I don’t need to suffer to watch it. I don’t need to be in pain. I don’t need to have to come from wounds. I simply need to say so. That’s what someone with a backbone does.

TS: I like it.

CM: If you want to buy something and overspend, just say, “You know what? I’m going to overspend. That’s what I want to do.” I’m going to own it. That’s what I want to do. I’m going to own that I do not care about the consequences of this. I’m going to stop blaming it on the fact that I am having an unhappy moment. I’m not having an unhappy moment. I want to have an unhappy moment so I can do this, so now I can give up being unhappy and just say, “I want to go spending.” So I can give up that whole shell and own the truth, and own the truth. “I want to go spend. I want a spending spree. I enjoy it. It’s a buzz for me. It makes me feel rich.”

Or, “I love the way people look at me when I go into a store and I’m treated like I’m a millionaire. I love the respect I get even for five minutes when they look at me and think that I have an endless bank account. It’s a thrill for me, and then I come out of there and I’ll deal with how I have no intention of paying it back. I’ll let the creditors chase me. It doesn’t bother. I don’t have a conscience about that. I suppose I have to admit that, too, and that’s my shadow because I feel I need that thrill because it serves me psychically and psychologically. It’s how I get respect in the moment, such as it is.” That’s how you do it.

TS: Very clear. Now, Caroline, in the [The Shadow Course] course, you make a distinction between listening to our conscience, or what you might call the voice of the soul, and listening to what you call the inner self, which is a voice that you say carries the Shadow. Can you help people understand this concept of the inner self? What’s the inner self?

CM: Well, I consider the inner self an anomaly of our time. It is more than the ego, but far less than the soul. The inner self was somewhat of a hybrid that emerged as we came into this era of the psyche, of the intuitive self, this post-nuclear age. We are the people, the generations, who are the explorers of the inner self, the world behind our “I”, inner space. People before the nuclear age were not consumed with the inner self. They were not consumed with finding meaning and purpose, and past lives, and processing every single feeling, and putting every feeling in front of them as having uber-significance. That wasn’t where that world came from prior to the nuclear age. That is the turning point, prior to the nuclear age.

The significance of emotions were far more in the atmosphere of, “Did you give your word and you keep your word?” Love, trust—the baser, solid, hard-core emotions that formed the pillars of society. We are now more in what I would call the quantum level of ourselves. Just like we’ve gone into quantum physics, we’ve gone into the quantum aetheric energy fields of ourselves where we’re discovering the atomic counterpart of ourselves, how powerful one word can be, how powerful our energetic field can be, and just like we have an internet, we have an “inner net”, and we are learning that we are in fact connected to each other through the soul. We’re discovering ourselves all over again, if not for the first time.

In this discovery of ourselves, we’re learning, realizing, that our inner world is a vastly, vastly deep and profoundly complex place, so it’s the ego, as was defined before, is associated with our identity and our survival self. But it’s insufficient to carry this self-examining, self-exploring, multileveled, complex additional self that is interested in healing and processing and exploring the multi-dimensions of our consciousness. That word was never ever used prior to the nuclear age by mainstream people, by mainstream people.

People in the 1930s and 1920s did not casually throw around the pursuit of consciousness, but we do. We do, and in fact, we’re obsessed with the healing of everything. Now, when you go into the inner self, this is a part where we start examining the significance of our own feelings, the significance of our wounds, the significance of our calling, the significance of, “Why was I born? For what purpose,” and so obsessed our way with this, that one of the aspects of our time is that we’ve developed a contempt for the ordinary. The idea of being ordinary is actually appalling to people. “I’m not ordinary. God, make me anything, but don’t make me ordinary.” So much so that parents name their children things like Sunshine, Meditation, Karma, anything but an ordinary name like Jane or Michael because it is just not recognized, not recognized.

The significance of being noted, people say to me all the time, “I know I was born for something special,” as if being special is the reason to be born, as if the life path is specialness. “I was born for specialness,” as if that’s the reason to be alive. This inner self is this kind of shell that begins to develop around a person as they form an interest in themselves, as their focus of, “Who am I and what am I feeling?” and the significance, “My feelings have huge significance. My place in the universe has huge significance. I must have a special reason to be born. I need to be noticed and when I’m not noticed, I am crushed and devastated. I had a devastating childhood because I was not noticed.”

As we began to overvalue our place, as overvaluing our significance, it’s place in within this shell became constructed. Now, at the same time, and this is important, at the very same time, the values of our collective society were something we left behind. Part of the characteristic of the inner self is that we separated, we went on individual sojourns, and we separated from the bodies that held collective accountability and collective values, like churches, like communities, like our collective spirit religions, so that we can’t identify any collective values that are held within our society at all, whereas before, the collective values were integrity, longevity. I mean integrity and honesty and morality, and ethics, and we knew what it was to take a vow and to hold vow, and we knew what it was, what it meant when someone took a vow of fidelity. We knew that it meant something. It means nothing now, it means absolutely nothing now.

If someone steps out and commits adultery, that word is never even used anymore. It’s like an archaic word that has to be dusted off. It hardly means a thing. It has no social clout. It means nothing. So our collective values mean… Among the values that we have lost is truth, telling the truth. We have shifted it for this. It’s more important for someone to speak their truth than to tell the truth. Where the inner self comes in, is it has become a vessel, a means through which a person can speak truth without the fear of being rejected because talking, saying, admitting, acknowledging, listening, dealing with truth at all in this society has become so uncomfortable that it’s called being too direct. It’s called misspeaking.

We even have a new archetype that’s called “the whistleblower” if you speak the truth, and if you do, and if you are a whistleblower, you’re arrested. That’s how harsh truth falls upon our ears. The inner self is how we do that. What we do is we say, “I got it on the inner self and my inner self feels this way. Now, I don’t feel this way, but it was, my inner self is telling me not to do this,” so it’s the—Your inner self is the most intimate part of you. It is that part that is more integrity, more honest, that part that has your private agenda, usually the agenda of the shadow, it’s the more manipulative part, the more vulnerable part, the part that holds onto your secrets. It’s the part that will say things like—Your outside will say whatever it needs to say to feel a part of a group, to feel accepted.

You’ll say, even down to this, “Do you care what restaurant we go to?” “Oh, no, no, no, no. Not at all,” but you’re inner self will say, “I don’t want to go there and you just never care about my needs.” Somehow the inner self will eventually let that be known or say, “I have to tell you the truth. This is the way I —This isn’t the kind, like my favorite food.” You didn’t say that up front, because you didn’t have the courage to just say. It has to come through the inner self, so it almost sounds like guidance, and that’s why the inner self can never be corrected. The inner self can never be attacked. It can never be criticized because it has that reputation of almost being guidance, of almost being sacred.

Everyone stands back when someone says, “I got it on the inner”—”Oh. Well, it must be guidance,” but it’s not. It’s just that part that a person has honed to be a little bit more accurate and that’s not your basic garden-variety survival ego that once was sufficient. Does that help?

TS: It does, but I’m still wanting to make sure that there’s not confusion between the voice of genuine guidance and what I’m mistaking for the inner self. How do I know the difference?

CM: The voice of genuine guidance is something that we attain when we develop a comfort zone with truth, Tami, when we develop self-esteem. Genuine guidance comes from having self-respect, from having a rapport with—As you develop a sense of rapport with yourself, a sense of self-respect, “I know who I am,” of values that you will not compromise no matter what, no matter what, “This is who I am. This is where I draw the line. I’m sorry. I will not compromise. I will not say something that’s not true. It’s not going to happen. It’s not going to happen. Whether or not you like me is not a relevant matter here. I don’t compromise my integrity,” when somebody, as someone develops that type of inner stamina, that person is automatically, automatically that clarity of internal voice is not something they’re afraid of.

They simply become more and more clear because they are more and more clear. It’s not something they have to work at. It’s not something they have to work at at all. That clarity simply is the result of becoming clear about yourself. They go hand-in-hand. It is not the result of diet, nutrition, vegetarian, nothing but as you become clear about who you are, what you will and will not tolerate, that you won’t compromise yourself, that you know your values, that you know that you are not in league with darkness, that when you get up in the morning the choices you make during the day are congruent with who you say you are, that in fact when you give your word, you keep it, that you are exactly the person you say. That as you become clear about yourself, your inner mechanism is as clear as you are about yourself, and you don’t ask for guidance to get you out of fogs you get into because you don’t tell the truth, because you’re screwing up other lives, because you’re frightened, because you’re making a mess out of your life.

Your guidance is all about, “How do I serve?” It’s about creativity. It’s about, “Help me bring something creative forward.” You don’t waste time with, “Can you give me guidance because I’m afraid I’m going to lose money.” You don’t waste your time asking for the type of guidance that heaven does not give. Heaven does not give that kind of guidance. It’s not a broker. It’s not a real estate broker and it’s not a banker.

TS: OK, Caroline, you state something that I thought was quite intriguing in [The Shadow Course]. You state, “People like their Shadow more than their light.”

CM: Oh, sure.

TS: I thought, “That’s interesting.” Can you unpack that for me?

CM: Well, the Shadow is a very safe place because people trust, people trust that first of all the Shadow is a place to hide. It’s very easy to say, “I don’t know why I do things.” There’s no accountability there. There’s no accountability. Look at the people at the hearings in Washington about the Russians. All they had to say is, “I’m not sure,” and the Senate moved on. There’s no accountability. They knew exactly what they were doing. All you have to do is play stupid, and there is absolutely no accountability in the Shadow. Though you have to say things like, “I didn’t mean that.” That’s a Shadow response, whereas when you’re in the light, you have to say, “I’m going to shine some light on myself and tell the truth that I knew exactly what I was doing and I did it anyway. I did it anyway.”

Or the light goes like this, which is, “I can see that you have an incredible talent and you would be very good for this job, and I’m going to support you in that,” but the Shadow in someone would be, “I’m so jealous of you. I can’t empower you that way so I’m going to pretend I don’t see your talent,” and it’s conscious, it’s conscious. “I can’t acknowledge the talent in someone else.” People are comfortable in that Shadow because it makes them, it gives them permission to do things, to act in negative ways and claim they’re innocent, and say they didn’t know better, that they didn’t know why they do what they do, when in fact they do, and then to claim that it wasn’t deliberate.

As I say to people in my workshop, “You’re not allowed to say, ‘I don’t know.’ You’re too old to say, ‘I don’t know.’ You’re too old. You can’t say this,” and here’s why, and it may sound like I’m so harsh. I’m not harsh. I am compassionately tough because what I know is that when you are suffering, you’re suffering because you’re lying to yourself, because conscience has not been emphasized in its role in health as properly and dynamically as it should be, that the role of conscience, the role of—That health is not about, healing and health is not about identifying what someone did to you. That may be part of cleaning out. But healing, healing is about getting that part out of you that is constantly fueling and festering and speaking to you about what you want to do to somebody else, the part of you that’s always festering like pus in your brain that says, “I just want to tell him this. I hate them. I want to make—I want to punish them for what they’re doing.”

That’s the part that is destroying your conscience because you know it’s not the right thing to do. In order for you to tolerate your own darkness, you have to really, really, really twist events that happened to you in such a way that you’re only the good person and never the bad person, and that you’re only—you have to choose to keep yourself a victim. Then you have to choose to sabotage your adulthood to keep wounds alive. You have to say that you’re feeling worse than you’re actually feeling. What this does is it creates a sense of self-loathing because you’re missing the strength and goodness of your own life. In order to tolerate that, you have to continually find people to blame for your weakness. It’s conscious. It is conscious.

Therapy will not get that out. Therapy is not a deep enough instrument, not at all, because it doesn’t examine conscience to the depth that is required. It does not, and it doesn’t examine the handiwork of evil—as clever as it is, as subtle as it is, and how it wraps itself around our inner self, and how it cleverly disguises itself as self-pity.

TS: OK. We’ve got to slow down here on this, the handiwork of evil? I need to understand what you mean by that.

CM: Darkness has many guises and one of them is self-pity. It comes through your weakest link, and it talks to you. It says things like, “You poor thing. You poor thing. Look at you. You poor thing, you poor thing,” and it emphasizes—You know that I just drench myself in the teachings of the classical mystics that go all the way back to the Desert Fathers and all the way back to the mystics in the Indian tradition and in the Hindu tradition and in the Tibetan tradition, and don’t make the mistake that because these sacred, sacred texts are old that their teachings are a waste of time. It is because they were written long before we were contaminated with technology, contaminated with the rational mind that makes them so pure, that makes them so perfect… the perfect vessels between the human being and the divine mind, the holiness of God, which is why these vessels, these sacred texts understood the way of light, the way of angels, the way of demons, the way of God, the way of nature so perfectly. Because there was no distraction between worlds and doubt had yet to be created.

When they talk about and write about the nature of darkness and how it penetrates into our world and they say things—like all the traditions, whether you’re Native American or Aboriginal or whether you go into Druid or whether you go into Catholic, or whether you go into Hindu, why do they all have protective rituals? What are they protecting themselves from? They’re protecting themselves from the vulnerability of the human being, to, let’s put it in physics, the terms of physics, psychic free radicals if you prefer. Psychic free radicals, conscious psychic free radicals. They’re attracted to—

TS: What do you mean by that, free radicals? What do you mean?

CM: Well, the free radicals in your body are source of illness, so let’s just say in the collective, psychic free radicals that’ll find their way into your individual energy system and that match the nature of your lowest psychic common denominator, that if you are someone who dwells in despair and in self-pity, the vibration, the law of attraction, you will attract to yourself that same frequency. That’s a low negative collective so if you want to think in terms that are not evil, call it that, but in my world, in my world, evil exists. The way that comes to you is it weighs in just like health. Disease finds its way to your weakest link. Darkness finds its way to your weakest link.

For the alcoholic, it’s the temptation to drink. That’s the weakest link. The voice in the head says, “Come on. You can handle one drink. What’s the matter with you? You know you can.” That’s the weakest link. For somebody who does blame and deserve, it’ll come in through blame and deserve. “Well, look. It’s always their fault. It’s not your fault. You never did anything. It’s that person’s fault. You were only trying your best. They never liked you,” blah, blah, blah. That voice, that voice will get activated, and that’s what darkness does. It activates your weakest strongest voice, and that’s how darkness acts, which is why Teresa of Avila, for example, always said in that prayer, “Lead me not into temptation.” “Don’t let me go there. Don’t let me follow that voice because it’ll get me in trouble. It’ll get me in trouble. If I let that voice, if I listen to that voice, it’ll get me in trouble. If I sit in a bar and I listen to the voice that says, ‘You can handle one drink,’ it’ll get me in trouble.”

Bill Wilson and his Alcoholics Anonymous, he identified that voice, “Don’t go there,” but he knew that it would take somebody, a group, a group of people, to help them fight that darkness that you had to go 90 days and several times, and you had to pray with these people to develop a field of grace around you, to get out of that negative clutch, the clutch of that negativity. Even then, it wasn’t enough. You had to go again and go again and continue to go because once is not enough. You have to constantly, constantly be on your guard. That’s what daily prayer is about, “Keep me on my guard. I will never be strong enough to be without prayer. I will never be strong enough, never. I will always be. Lead me not into temptation, because I am always, always going to meet that one person that is one notch stronger than I am, that is one notch, that can just trigger my weakest link.” That’s what I mean.

TS: OK, Caroline. There’s so much I want to talk to you about, but I’m going to see if I can squeeze a few more questions in. You mentioned the role of conscience in our health and how important that is. In [The Shadow Course], you talk about a shadow issue that I think a lot of people are challenged by, which is greed. You go so far as to say, “If we’re challenged by unconscious greed, it can show up in the lower part of our body, particularly—”

CM: Even conscious, even conscious greed.

TS: OK, “—in our sciatic nerves.”

CM: Yes.

TS: You get that specific. I’m curious, are there other shadow issues in your work as a medical intuitive where you say, “You know, that Shadow issue and this part of the body almost always go together”?

CM: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Yes. I’m glad you asked that question because I think the way I’ve been speaking can give the idea that all Shadow issues are negative, like greed is negative, but you can be greedy for attention. If someone has been very lonely, that need for attention is understandable. But what people don’t often realize is that that need for attention, it can backfire in them because this is how negativity can work. They can tell themselves, “I am not worthy of being loved. No one will ever love me,” so as… that need will take a negative path and they might start becoming fragile or manipulative, or they might find themselves violating their own boundaries in order to have affection from somebody, compromising, getting involved with someone they don’t really love because they don’t think that love will ever come along. You see what I’m saying there?

TS: Yes, I do.

CM: OK. Then on another—I just want to make sure that people understand that these issues can be quite tender. They can be quite understandable, quite compassionate about this. They’re not always aggressive and hostile and negative like stealing or something, but another that affects the body quite overtly is responsibility. Here you’d say, “Well, what’s wrong with being responsible?” There’s nothing. Everybody, everybody has to tackle responsibility, but where it can become the type of negativity that I’m speaking of now where you think that you’re doing a good job but you don’t realize you’re going into the Shadow is two ways. One is that because we all have to take responsibility for our life. That’s nature’s way, nature demands every creature take responsibility for its life to its best capacity to do that. I repeat, to its best capacity to do that.

When a person in the extreme, either works to avoid, consciously uses his or her life choices and creativity to find ways to avoid responsibility in the extreme, to avoid it, to use their creativity to go into identity theft, to do anything but work, anything but a healthy route of responsibility, or they do the other route in the extreme, and I emphasize in the extreme, tell themselves that “If I don’t do it, the whole thing will just collapse. If I don’t do it, nobody can do it. I’m the one, only me, only me, and if I don’t do it…” What that does is creates this idea that, “I am irreplaceable and if I don’t do it, nobody will survive,” and that is simply not true. Life goes on no matter who dies. Everybody’s death or everybody’s retirement or everybody’s exit reshuffles the deck for people certainly.

The fact is, life goes on. When we tell ourselves that we’re the only one, what we do, and we don’t realize we often do this, is we shortchange other people from learning how to take responsibility. The people that are around us, we oftentimes steal their maturity because of the way we are. What that does, the organ that pays the price for our choice to take their responsibility on ourselves, and keep them miniaturized in their responsibility, is the pancreas. Oftentimes, most often, you will see that when people have diabetes or pancreatitis, there will always be an extreme of responsibility involved somewhere.

TS: OK. One more shadow issue I want to bring up and then I have two final questions. The shadow issue is envy. I notice, Caroline, sometimes, that I feel envious of certain people. I know whenever I feel that, that there’s something that wants my attention. Help me understand your view of how, through the type of Shadow work you teach, you would help somebody deal with moments of envy.

CM: I think envy is when… I obviously think that… I do think that it’s difficult to… I remember when I was in college and the girls, a lot of girls, were getting engaged and blah, blah, blah, blah. I admit to feeling a little spark, not much, but a spark of envy as they were looking and getting married and all of that. It didn’t last long. I took a couple of aspirin and it passed. But I did have this… I’m not plagued with envy as one of my shadows. I really am grateful for it, because I’ve seen the suffering. But I did early on wonder what it would be like to have children, and to have that path. Then I had this deep time in which I examined that path, which would be the same of what I would counsel somebody, which is, “Take your eyes off someone else’s life. Get your eyes off the life that you envy and don’t look there again. Do not look there again, and don’t look in the same way.”

If it’s someone who is in your field and you have to look at them, then the way you are looking is you are assuming things, you’re making things up. You are making things up. You are projecting your fantasies onto their life. You’re projecting your childhood fantasies onto their life, and that’s what we have to deal with. If I was your spiritual director, I’d say, “All I want you to do is write down your childhood fantasies. Maybe they’re a princess knight. Maybe they’re being in a castle. Maybe they’re… Whatever they are. But whatever they are, you write those down and you get your eyes off that person. You’re projecting that you have no idea what their life is really like and you, I want you to focus on everything, everything that’s good in your life, everything. Every day, I want you to show up with three things that you appreciate about your life that you did not see yesterday.”

TS: OK. This is a very important question to me, Carolyn, which is how the personal Shadow work that you’ve been talking about here in this interview and that you teach in the eight-week course along with Andrew Harvey, how that relates to the sense that we have a collective Shadow that is operating in our sociopolitical world that is so upsetting to so many people, and the work that we do with ourselves, with our sense of over-responsibility, with our envy, with our greed, whatever it might be?

CM: You’re packing too much into one question.

TS: I’m packing in, because what I want to find out is how does this personal Shadow work that we do relate to our collective Shadow, the collective Shadow that we’re concerned about?

CM: We’re the engines of everything that happens. We’re the engines of the events around us. I don’t think that’s a principle that people get. They don’t get that because too many people say, “I don’t watch the news. I don’t want to look at this. I don’t want to look at that,” and yet they don’t get that you’re the engine of this event, and everything that happens around you filters into your life. I don’t care if you’re not watching the news or reading it, the energetics of it are affecting you. They are affecting your bank account. They’re affecting your economy. They’re affecting your food. They’re affecting it. So what are you talking about not watching this and not watching that? What’s the matter with you?

This is one of my issues about this so-called “conscious era” that we’re living in, which has never been more unconscious. By this late date, 60 years of being in these conscious waters, we should have backbones of titanium when, in fact, we are weaker than we’ve ever been. We are more unhealthy than we’ve ever been. We require more vitamins. We’re more drugged than we’ve ever been. We are far too hypersensitive for our own survival. We should be able to look at the news and then some, and take it like troopers. By this time, we should be able to look and tolerate, look and take anything with Buddhist detachment, and be able to see clearly what’s going on, at least understand the two things. We’re going through the evolution of one era and into the other and that the mythologies of all the gods are breaking down, not because priests have gone rogue in the church, but because the myths of all religions no longer fit the size of the souls we are becoming.

It’s time for those myths to go down, because none of them include a cosmic galactic-size story of the divine. We are about to enter a galactic community, so those stories of God have got to be retired. And humanity is doing battle because they don’t want to give that up. and that part of our work now is to evolve into global human beings, and the role is look at yourself and see how you’re fighting that, see how you’re fighting it. Very few people want to become globalized, very few people. Look to yourself at how you’re fighting developing a global identity. That in fact we’ve never been more territorial than we are now, that for the last 60 years this idea of becoming one humanity has fallen upon deaf ears because that is not the way politics is.

We’ve never been more separate. We don’t want refugees here. We don’t want any. We’ve never been more prejudiced. We’ve awakened the pattern of the Civil War, for God’s sake. We’re going backwards, not forwards. Someone could say to me, “Oh. Well, we’re recycling and there’s all these little pockets of people doing all these little things”—look at the whole. Look at who’s the president, look at the hostility, look at the murders, look at the violence, look at how much power the NRA has, look what’s happening with Brexit in Europe. Open your eyes. The fact is, the majority of choices people have made in the last 60 years have been to become isolated, to follow themselves and not participate in the country community, to not pay attention to government, to not participate.

The fact is, we dropped the ball on our own nation. So what’s going on now? We have to wake up and realize the mystical truths. What is in one, is in the whole. We have what it takes to change things, but not by doing like little recycling gigs. This is about recognizing, “Wait a minute here. Whoa. I got to put the brakes on here. I need to become a spiritual activist, a political activist. I can’t look the other way. This is my planet. This is my community. I need to participate at every level. This is a body I live in. My country has a soul, and it has a physical body, it has an energetic body. It’s no different than my own, than my own, than my own. If I have hostility toward political parties, then I have to deal with that. I have to deal with that because that’s keeping my nation broken. My nation is broken. It’s broken. What can I do to participate? What do I have to learn? What do I have to do? What do I have to do to maintain the Constitution and freedom because this is a difficult passage, and if I don’t participate in it, if I do not, then the future generation, my own life may end up without freedom.”

TS: When you say the one, the mystical truths, the one is in the whole, so you believe in addition to paying attention to the collective concerns. That the personal Shadow work that we’re doing is actually an engine of change?

CM: Yes, and I believe you have to look at what’s erupting is the collective Shadow that—this isn’t coming out of nowhere. This is the underbelly of humanity. Humanity is not a sophisticated animal. It’s a predator, and it’s very difficult for us to be sharing creatures. In a small scale, it is, but we don’t want to share the planet yet. We’re still living from the idea that there’s not enough. We don’t get that if we look up and see solar, there’s plenty, but we keep looking down. We don’t get that if we look at each other through the soul, we would only see each other, but we keep looking at the body.

It’s time for us to evolve into our energetic form primarily so that we would get we are all truly connected on the “inner net” but for all the language we have used spiritually, we don’t yet live there. This is that great turning point. This is it. This is the turning point from energy to matter, from body to soul. This is it. We’re living this. It’s a privilege to be alive now, but it is a passageway. Make no mistake. It may take a century. It may take two centuries or whatever, but that’s what we’re living.

TS: Here’s my final question for you. I also interviewed Andrew Harvey, your co-teacher, in the eight-week shadowing course, and I asked him the same question, which is, I think of the two of you as very talented “Shadow busters”, meaning—

CM: Shadow busters?

TS: You are. No matter who’s in the room, my sense is that you have this gift at tuning into the Shadow that’s not quite being said or presented but is operating in the room or in a person, and I’m wondering if you agree, and if so, what makes you such a good Shadow buster?

CM: I have no difficulty… I’m not afraid of it. I don’t live in it. I’m not naïve. I’m not an optimistic. I’m not a pessimist. I’m a realist. I’ve never re-created the universe to suit a vision that says there’s no such thing as evil. I spend a lot of time dealing with my own shadow, so I know it’s real. All of the above, and I also see life through the lens of if there is a light, there’s got to be a Shadow because that’s how nature designed things. If there’s an up, there’s a down. If there’s a left, there’s a right. This idea that, “I don’t believe in the Shadow because it just doesn’t appeal to me,” is intellectual arrogance at its worst.

Then I see all these people wearing stones and feathers and all this nonsense around their neck, and I think, “What’s that for?” They’ll say, “Negativity.” I’m just like, “Oh, stop it.” If you’re going to deal with negativity—If you’re going to deal with evil, then do it with a backbone. Learn how to pray. Bow your head. Kick your shoes off on sacred ground. Don’t do it with rocks. You can’t throw rocks at evil. You can’t deal with it either with feathers and rocks. You need prayer. You need the real thing. You need to have God as an ally. You need God as an ally, however it is you define that force, however it is you define it, but believe me, there is something greater than you in the heavens and it is intimate.

This universe is a very impersonal place. The laws of, the mystical laws are, this is an impersonal universe where—I don’t believe in religions. I love to study them and talk about them. I have gone after the mystical laws as they are taught in all traditions, and that is where the jewels are. That’s the gold, that’s the truth, that’s the nectar. Because that’s what applies to every human being. All the laws are impersonal. Their mathematics is impersonal. Gravity is impersonal. Just like Buddha, the laws of change. Change is, Buddha says, “It’s change and you’re going to suffer if you fight it.” That’s impersonal. He’s talking to everybody.

The law of Jesus, Jesus said, “If you hang onto things, it’s going to hurt. That’s forgiveness. Let go of the dead.” He was talking to everybody. He was talking to everybody. In Tibetan wisdom, “Don’t hang on to spectacles. It’s going to kill you.” Then I find that all of these teachings, these universal laws… [barking dog] That’s my dog. Excuse me everybody. Hold it. All of those laws are exactly the laws that apply to the well-being of our health, every one of them, every single one of them, our core to the maintenance of our body and soul, every one of them.

You hang onto something, you’re going to lose your energy. You lose your energy, you lose your health. Simple as that, and without understanding that, you can’t call your soul back. You can’t detach, you can’t detach without forgiveness. You can’t and you won’t. You can’t detach because your pride won’t let you, and you only battle pride with grace. No amount of therapy, no amount of therapy will ever, ever challenge your pride. Only grace will get you, and so there we go, my darling. That is full circle.

TS: I’ve been speaking with Caroline Myss along with Andrew Harvey, her co-teacher, in an eight-week to know yourself and bring light to the world, a new online course called [The Shadow Course] that starts on September 1. Caroline, it’s always great to talk to you. I always, always, always learn something. Thank you so much.

CM: Thank you. What a pleasure.

TS: SoundsTrue.com, many voices, one journey. Thanks everyone for listening.

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